By Marie-Bernard Koltes
Translated by Doron Tavori
Directed by Yael Kremski
Herzliya Theater Ensemble
March 16
An L-shaped light-pole stands aslant the bare stage that is the set of Dealer. From it small round red lights flicker and change as if to comment on the changing relationships and attitudes between the two actors, Doron Tavori and Nimrod Bergman. They have no names. They stand “on neutral ground, on the pathway between here and there.” We don’t know what the deal is they are talking about except that it is a deal that Tavori seeks to make with Bergman, impose on him, or inveigle him into, either through “arrogance or surrender.”Perhaps those two words are the key; that the whole of human relationship lies in the chinks between the two, and as Tavori, pushing a small oil lamp on a pole, and Bergman move around the stage among yet more changing lights (dim), or are moved by their wants like chessmen on a board, their words, their attitudes trade the aspects of both. Neither gives in. Like life.It is a bravura turn. Bergman is upright, inflexible, still. Tavori mopes, cringes, gestures. Nothing happens, for Heaven’s sake, yet one hardly dare draw breath lest what doesn’t happen next be missed.There is a “but,” though. Dreadful acoustics garble chunks of the text so that it’s hard to understand, and for a play this interesting and the AAA performance of it, that is a pity.
In the End Someone’s Gonna Die
Written and directed
by Maor Zaguri
Habima
March 19“Youth is wasted on the young,” wrote George Bernard Shaw, while a century or so before, Henry David Thoreau observed that “most men lead lives of quiet desperation.”Both aphorisms fit Zaguri’s Tweet of a play. It’s directed with an equal economy, the production is tight, effective, often comic, and it’s sure to attract the young audience for which it was written.The young, aged 18-29, are the six characters, in search not of anauthor but of meaning, of something to anchor the lives in which theyflail desperately because they haven’t a notion of how to encompassliving.Yardena (Yafit Assulin) takes care of her invalid fatherand caters to her loser fiancé Ben Zion (Meni Florentin) – bothresentfully. Pole-dancer Luli (Vered Feldman) is pregnant, responsiblefor her weirdo sister Niko (Leah Gelfenstein), and attracted toclueless Adam (Tomer Ben David) who has been saddled with his queryretarded – query mentally-ill brother Yossi (Daniel Sabag).OnShani Tor’s apt monochrome street-grid set, the six, maneuvering atable and two chairs, increasingly interact as their lives increasinglyspin away from them. These are six very gifted young actors. They do agood job. Meir Alon’s lighting is first rate too.